Steve Rustad illuminates issues and dissects politics

Gee it's tough being a Petaluma City Councilperson, so many activists to placate, constituents to coddle and issues to straddle. And of course, in this climate of diminished revenues (let's not trouble ourselves as to why revenues are diminished), all city departments have to share the pain equally. No favorites. [...]

Historically, when the word "growth" has been uttered in the local cloisters of power, it's usually been coupled with other words such as "surgical removal," or "over our dead bodies." Lip service is given plenty to "increasing revenues," but given the progressive bias for regressive taxation, intrusive regulation and hectoring [...]

Clearly Obama the Magnificent paid close attention to his anarchist tutors when he was coming up in the Windy City. Or did you really think the ex-Weathermen who coached the young OTM had renounced their beliefs just because their hair got gray? The lesson being: If you can make things bad [...]

After all the foot-dragging, hysteria, disingenuous arguments, outright lies, and frivolous litigation that verged on blackmail, Petaluma will finally plug some of the "retail leakage" that serious citizens have been complaining about for nearly a decade.

With all the angst over the so-called "fiscal cliff," attention is drawn away from a recurrent drain on the Federal Treasury, which ranges from Federal meddling in the marketplace to legislator's pet projects that benefit few at a cost to many, that does far more damage to the national economy.

I received a copy of Antifragility, the latest book by Nassim Taleb who previously authored the The Black Swan. He writes in the book's Prologue, "At no point in history, have so many...with no personal exposure, exerted so much control (over the lives of others who are at risk)" That [...]

Personally, I wouldn't miss some of the pork, I mean "vital" programs, that could be pitched over the looming "fiscal cliff" into well-deserved oblivion. One of my favorite candidates is the zombie (e.g., ever-recurring despite guarantees that it will end when the technology reaches maturity) subsidy for wind power. The [...]

Of the two default states of Congress, hysterical panic or clueless optimism, I'm not sure which produces more miss-targeted, poorly written or outright destructive legislation. One thing is sure, stupidity is bi-partisan.

Judging from Jerry Brown's public utterances about building California's infrastructure, he must be spending extra time praying at his dad's shrine. As many of you will no doubt remember, Governor Pat Brown's tenure is viewed through the rosy lens of nostalgia as the Golden State's Golden Age, back when California [...]

I just resigned from the Cinnabar School board after more than 12 years as a trustee. No, not from frustration - though there was plenty of that courtesy of the narrow-minded, self-serving, boneheads in Sacramento. The reason was that Colleen and I moved to Cotati and, as a result, I no longer reside in the district - a requirement for trusteeship. I grew up in Los Angeles during the salad days of California, when the Golden State lead the country in education, productivity and imagination. Today, thanks to decades of ever-increasing state-employee entitlements, a ferocious anti-business mindset, and pie-in-the-faith in liberal fantasies, California still leads the country...in population exodus, business relocations, and crushing debt. People get so exercised about the encroachment of Hispanic influence on our culture, when the real threat to California is that it's turning into Greece.